News Archive

Two new centres opened on our campus on the same day recently - and they address our sleeping and waking needs.

One is the Centre for Sleep Science and the other the Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions.

Primary sleep disorders cost the Australian community $10 billion every year as a result of lost productivity and accidents. In recognising the vital importance of good sleep, our University spent $1 million towards a refurbishment of the Centre at 10 Parkway.

The Centre has three bedrooms equipped with state-of-the art sleep recording and analysis equipment, as well as consulting and training rooms. It is headed by Winthrop Professor Peter Eastwood, whose research focuses on the challenges to breathing during wakefulness, sleep and general anaesthesia.

His other collaborative sleep-related research areas include schizophrenia and sleep disorders; the effect of cold-water immersion on sleep; the relationships between stroke, dysphagia and sleep apnoea, measuring head and body position during sleep, gastroesophageal reflux and sleep disorders, and the potential role of nerve stimulation to treat sleep apnoea.

At the opening, Vice-Chancellor Professor Alan Robson said UWA looked forward to the Centre extending our reputation as a leading institution for science in general, and sleep research in particular.

"Sleep research at this University already enjoys an international reputation. Our researchers have made breakthroughs in finding new ways of ensuring that more of us get a better night's sleep," he said.

"They have investigated the mechanisms that underlie breathing-related sleep disorders such as sleep apnoea and snoring. This research is regularly published in top international and national scientific and medical journals and presented at high profile conferences.

"In 2009, the collaborative sleep program between this University and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital was chosen from 8,000 medical research projects as being one of the 10 Best National Health and Medical Research Council Projects," Professor Robson said.

Professor Eastwood said the refurbished Centre offered a wonderful opportunity to expand our existing research program into areas such as insomnia, shift-work and jet-lag.

"These studies will include researchers from across the whole University - in psychology, public health, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and engineering," he said.

"A particularly exciting development is the new collaboration with the Raine Study Group which, if funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, proposes to perform sleep studies on 1,800 young adults over the next three years. The data collected from this study will represent a huge, internationally unique resource that will provide insights into the natural history of sleep disorders."

From 1100 to 1800, Europe went through massive changes; their social and cultural effects continue to reverberate, even here in modern Australia.

The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, European expansion overseas, the Black Death, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment - all of these upheavals took place in the period 1100 to 1800. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions will help us understand the emotional causes and consequences of such phenomena, and how the long history of emotions in Europe underpins modern Australian culture and heritage.

The Centre's Director, Winthrop Professor Philippa Maddern, said our social lives, our sense of the past, our cultural reference-points and even European people's first contact with our Indigenous people and our Asian neighbours are all affected by what happened in Europe centuries ago.

Professor Robson said at the opening that UWA was privileged to have been chosen as the host for this new Centre, which has been allocated the biggest-ever grant awarded to the humanities in the history of the Australian Research Council grants program.

The Centre boasts a budget of more than $24 million from the ARC, as well as more than $10 million worth of contributions from its partner institutions. UWA's contribution is more than $2 million.

The funding is spread over seven years to facilitate international research collaborations, outputs including a major book series and journal articles, as well as international-level performance projects with associated recordings and broadcasts.

"We are also very excited about the opportunities the Centre will give us for developing new national and international collaborations. Industry partners in this venture include WA Opera, the National Gallery of Victoria and the ABC. We have leading researchers from our University as well as from the universities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland," Professor Robson said.

The centre also boasts international partners from universities throughout Europe. Together, talented individuals from these partner organisations will maximise interdisciplinary synergies and create a paradigm of large-scale Humanities research. They will also train a new generation of researchers in interdisciplinary and industry-linkage skills.

The Centre's researchers aim to invigorate Australian performance practice and formulate policy suggestions for improving our nation's social and cultural well-being. They will involve the public through school programs and by disseminating research associated with major performances in opera, art exhibitions and drama.

Published in UWA News , 27 June 2011